


oilwater

by meatmarket



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hannibal (TV) Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-11 12:58:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19928443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meatmarket/pseuds/meatmarket
Summary: “Are we an ‘us’?”“You are you. I am me. You are also me, inverted.”“A negative.”“Yes. The colors might seem quaint.”“They’re ugly,” Taeyong says.“Come anyway.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> N-781.
> 
>   
>  *** here there be some corpse/cadaver talk, violence, existential crisis, n the like**  
> 
> 
> i would like to thank the academy and the mods for not pulverizing my balls despite having all rights reserved to, just gently groping them n knocking on the entrance
> 
> for my [redacted],  
> for whoever ordered this,  
> and for brethreny, who hates jaeyong

_On the day of John Doe’s expiry,_

his breath smells like rotten fruit when he breathes out last. Fermented, ill.

***

The bagel is so airy it’s just egg. Taeyong chews its fluff, sniffs, brings the handsaw down, starts sawing.

The noises come crunching and he holds over the neck to noose in the struggle. He breathes uneven through his mouthful. Butter pudges in the corner of his mouth and he tastes poppy.

Tonguing some from the stacked grooves of his teeth doesn’t help. His throat constricts. His hands look inflamed in the stabbing cold, one cramped in place and the other blurring in and out, in and out.

The noises blur, too, twitching in tandem with his hands. His forearms are on fire but leaden and concentrating most of his weight. He’s frantic like a hamster. He only stops sawing when he realizes the blood.

“Shit,” he says. A chunk of bagel sleets out of his mouth onto his boot.

He stares and stares at the log and sawdust slobbered over with blood. Through the fuzz of his breathing, he lifts his hand and associates what he just saw with his cleaved thumb, how the nail bed drips.

It looks like raw steak. The air stings him in the nerves and the blood warms down his wrist and tucks nasty under the loose of his jacket sleeve.

From the base of his spine, Taeyong arches out a flat sound into the branch-clawed sky.

The horizon pulls, dipped white in sugar as far as he can squint. It’s hard to tell daybreak and sundown apart in the winter.

He inspects back to the cottage’s window, treads needles in expecting the lacy curtain to move.

Not feeling his nose, he crouches down and knocks his knee into the prostrate wheelbarrow, just borrowing some solidarity. That’d be it. His breath clouds out thick. He digs for clean snow with his good hand. He gathers it into a splint around his bad thumb.

Cramping below his scapula, he loads the logs just so he can leave the amoebic splash of blood be. From the sty, Yok the goose stabs its beak into the wooden little door. Taeyong locks the honk out behind his.

  
“I don’t want you inside the house,” Taeyong says. “Nothing personal.”

Johnny’s flat red nose sniffs. In his armpit, there are case files wedged. He looks at the tuna can Taeyong is scraping out into a bowl. “You seen the paper? There’s a sick bastard terrorizing people. Ordinary people.”

“There’s plenty of sick bastards out there. Most of them don’t make the news.”

“Tell me why this one does.”

Knifing open another can, Taeyong bends the lid like a smile and it crows all the pull. The oil pours like hot wax, stringing little pieces of meat.

“He was creative with his stuffing.” He parts the meat with the fork. “At first. Except it’s post-turkey season.”

“He carves people up.”

“Because he thinks that’s what they’re for.”

“So you’ve thought about it. Him.”

“That’s too loud.”

Uyu wads out of the door crack, his pink little snout preceding his body of long white fur. It’s ironed strangely in places like it gets after his naps. He makes no sound, just stares at Johnny big, stares long, and deigns to catwalk towards the bowl in front of Taeyong that’s absolutely not his.

Taeyong licks the fork clean.

After a big pulse of nothing, Johnny asks, spreading his words, “How does he choose ‘em?”

“Wrong question.”

“Why,” Johnny amends, “does he choose them?”

Knees popping, Taeyong stands up.

“This is… not my job, Johnny. We’ve tried this before. It didn’t work out.”

“No, it worked too well.”

“So well, in fact, it got our friend eaten,” Taeyong says.

Johnny looks like he’s taking care to check in with his body, part by part.

“I reached out,” he says.

He did.

“Multiple times.”

Yes.

“And you didn’t pick up, so I left you voicemails,” Johnny says again. “Which you never hear, anyway.”

“Pass this on to your next best.” Which would be… “Kim?”

“They can’t help those people find dignity, Taeyong. Only you can.”

Wryly, Taeyong thinks he might throw up, yanked by his belly button like someone’s waiting at the door to his slick insides. Chop, chop. Chop chop chop.

He looks at Johnny’s overpadded shoulder.

“Nobody can.”

  
Johnny leaves. After Taeyong has fed the cats and the goose and the cats have ballooned with contentment, licking long, the swollen pile of blankets on the couch stirs.

On the periphery, Taeyong minds the eggs. He’s warmed by the hot melt from the stove. He fried them steeply at the beginning, into little suns at the edges, then tamed it so the yolks could remain happy-jiggly in the center.

“Time’s it?” the couch pile slurs.

“Lucky it’s the weekend-o’clock.”

The cats sense this. They clump around the array of bowls, tickling Taeyong’s ankles with the dusters of their tails. As Jisung piles onto the chair, Taeyong piles the table with crab and peanuts and dumplings.

“Wait for the salad,” Taeyong reprimands.

“What’s that?” Jisung mumbles around his fork.

Under the oiled salad bowl, Johnny’s files squat like thick toads. Taeyong has leafed through them three times. From the inside of one’s spine pokes out the pen he stuck in like a bookmark.

“Work.”

“The backs of your hands look like veiny crabs.”

Taeyong slants Jisung a look. Jisung shrugs.

“Mom didn’t think so, though.”

Taeyong takes his time to peel the celery into limp strands.

“It’s the veins. I think you’ve got more veins than the average Joe,” Jisung says.

Vaguely, Taeyong is aware the faucet in the kitchen is dripping.

Huddled with the cats and a nodded-off Jisung, Taeyong rotates his ankle that’s also nodded off. Jisung weighs nothing, but even nothing gets heavy after holding it up for a while. His leg’s feeling comes back to him in needles and the strange arrest of waiting them out.

He’s on leafing number four when a cramp downcuts his arm angle, making him switch hands before he drops shit. As he does, he glances at Jisung’s nose squashed against his chest, where he’s drooling up the Caspian Sea.

Taeyong thinks for a way out of this mud. For a passage to simpler existing, where he can slowly get, year by year, bored to insanity with the brain melt of the mundane life. People do that expertly. Die where they were born, not moving an inch to the left field, chained to the womb. 

He could do that. He could have that. Pack his bags, kill the grudge that’s keeping him alive, recycle himself. He’s good at leaving.

The space between his index and middle finger’s last knuckles needs a buffer, badly.

Jisung worms some.

When Taeyong’s pulse jogs against his dehydrated temples, he maneuvers out his phone, pulls back the brightness, and texts Johnny. 

  
He takes the bus. On the bus, he finger-purées the bug on the bus window, leaving a greasy cartoon explosion stain.

When there are no more stops for the bus to stop at, he walks. At the gates, he gets deep-fried by the security units because they imply he “has a face.” There’s two of them. One skinny with his face melting off in the minus-something degrees and the other with his belt thonged up his sweaty armpits.

But all Taeyong can think about is what he’s not looking at.

The skinny one is silhouetted by the manor. The manor is sinking in the whipped cream from yesterday’s blizzard.

He hasn’t been here in a while. The manor walls boa along the hill’s shoulders so vehemently you can peek little crystal winks from down, down there, wondering what they are. Those are the windows reflecting like wet eyeballs.

The two-pronged roof used to be a true brown brick, sat like mousy washed-up silt right where the third floor ended, and then it was a powder black sheet of smoke for a horrible flash. And it smelled of people then, for that flash. Burned meat in the fresh smells like a smoker’s breath and cheese after a long night, Taeyong remembers. It pinches you sour in the eyes.

The roof is all new now, replaced, shingled brick-red from under scoops of snow. He feels kidney stones clumping in his sides at the sight.

_want me there?_

_want me there?_

_want me there?_

He didn’t reply to Johnny after ( _want me there?_ ), even though he was aware enough to ask. Calling it kindness would be pushing it.

No, he doesn’t want Johnny here. And if Johnny knew when to fuck off, he’d have an inkling, too.

What he wants is Johnny’s underhanded cop pull to slingshot him in and get him out.

In a moment of—nothing, Taeyong proofreads the cell’s corners for openings that could be pried like cans of fish. The circular holes lower in the middle for air passage tell him just how thick they had to be cut out, and it should be a comfort.

He feels being leeched off of, regarded, as it’s once been put. His morning eggs bubble sunny-side up from deep in his gut and his legs hiccup in place. Taeyong pricks his eyes up hitch by hitch and decides this distance is just fine.

Because there.

“I was wondering when you’d come.”

Jaehyun looks a thing. Packed in full-body white, a bar of soap uncinched in the middle, and from behind the precise glass panels, he makes a most unexceptional artifact. That glass is meant to have domesticated him.

The hair on him limps, his hands mellow at his sides. Those Taeyong remembers best.

“Did you—”

“No,” Taeyong says.

And Jaehyun’s face, laid smooth like dried glue, as white, doesn’t animate in the powdery light. But Taeyong knows the thinness of Jaehyun’s skin in real outside weather, that those layers now are just lightplay laughing at him.

The air carries book and what he thinks was a hearty breakfast.

Jaehyun tugs his collar up from its wilt.

“A shame,” he says.

It’s in that shame Taeyong presents the file clutched at his side, the one Johnny left for him. It springs violently, but he’s accustomed and slows its unroll.

“You’re losing your touch.”

Taeyong seeps like ink into Jaehyun’s eyes. They’re black, two little dots, and something else terribly ill unfurls to attention in him. It pokes for space. It’s in his throat but swallowing doesn’t help and his raw finger feels bigger, reviewing the sawing, and Taeyong is now aware of the cameras in queasy acuteness.

“You could lose fingers,” Jaehyun adds.

“Nine to go,” Taeyong says. His split thumb swells like a heartbeat.

Makes him wonder who’s watching. Maybe Lee and his tacky obsession with this all both.

Jaehyun seems to plateau. Taeyong hopes it’s awkward. Removed. Formal.

Then, “You’ve always been cautious. Now you’re back. Cautiously?”

“I’m not the one with monitored stool practice,” Taeyong reminds. Thinks of how ends look.

He can count on one hand the number of smiles Jaehyun has grazed with teeth. He remembers them all to the pore, the distant creases, where the cheek pulled, how the shadow sat when he’d shaved skin-tight.

Here comes another one, but instead it laughs out of him. Jaehyun’s head whips to the side, his eyes squeezing. He looks so lovely Taeyong almost wants to see it again.

Gone in a blink though it is, Jaehyun says, “You never come to visit.”

His voice noses into the crook of Taeyong’s arm, his neck. He fears if someone half-dumb opens their mouth, it’ll slither in and hook into their hard palate and jerk.

He knows Joohyun’s paranoia is nothing to underestimate. He’d gotten a taste of it after, after. Some two years after, when he woke up in his cottage to another gutting voicemail.

“It’s about the Tooth Fairy,” Taeyong says.

Jaehyun ticks from Taeyong’s eyes to his mouth and throat, to the dinosaur bandage thimbled around his thumb. Its cartoon snout suffered in the double tuck over his nail, its eye gone big.

“Have you been leaving presents under your pillow?”

“Just my gun.”

Jaehyun sinks his chin. The overlay parting him from Taeyong glosses with the angle and makes his eyes jewel.

“Johnny’s well had dried up so he came to badger you. Well enough, to be sure. Your well is drowning you, so now you’re come to badger me.

“What does it say about him that he sends an addict to an exercise in relapse?”

Taeyong feels insect crawling a pincushion along his back. Little wings fan bilaterally up his spine and skitter under his skin and muscle into ingrown nothing.

“You refuse?” Taeyong asks.

“It would be detrimental to your mental state.”

Jaw set, Taeyong approaches. He sticks the files in the metal compartment through which Jaehyun receives his mail and leaves. 

  
Taeyong jolts awake to the toaster popping. His heart is wild between his tonsils, glugging blood. His ankles are tangled in a way that gives him grief to regain control of. And he sticks a hand… out through. Something.

He identifies the smother as blankets and the other smother as a cat’s ass tickling his chin.

Jisung has made burned eggs.

“They kinda look like Harvey Dent,” Jisung apologizes gingerly.

“Then they won’t feel a thing,” says Taeyong, yawning like cracking open a walnut. “Half of ‘em, anyway.”

“Your half?” Jisung chances, smiling tiny.

  
“This the one?”

“The. Most recent goodie.”

“How old?”

“Thirteen hours post-algor, tops.”

“Why didn’t any—”

“He was having his quarter day off,” Yukhei remarks.

“I was having my quarter day off,” Renjun tails, unbothered.

“Was nobody here?” Taeyong asks.

“Sure there was,” Renjun says dubiously, turning to Yukhei, “somebody.”

“Johnny pulled me off my vacation,” Yukhei says. “Urgent, he said. That’s how my every trip to Russia ends. People just can’t take a break from getting necked before I get to ski.” He stills as if thinking of tacking a footnote.

“What’s in Russia?” Taeyong cants, wading through the pudding of it all. Snuggled in the tundra of this morgue, his teeth start to chink like ice cubes.

“He thinks he’s got relatives there.”

“I have,” Yukhei says, “roots there. Did one of those ancestry DNA tests, you know the one? They’ll dissect you for fifty bucks. Pull the lips wider.”

Recovering from his stare, Renjun does as asked and the corpse’s mouth corners tear like wet toilet paper. “Gross,” he says lightly, baring the gappy gums.

“Totally,” Yukhei concedes. He pokes a finger into the corpse.

Where it’s not seeping colors like a teabag, the corpse is white as a tooth.

The corpse is a he. He looks, joint-locked, like Taeyong’s cats when their eyes bulge, and his pockmarked cheeks look like cellulite. His flesh sheets over his bones Halloween ghostlike, slanting off from the peaks in a way that raises cheekbones strange places. The way the face is thumbed-over reminds Taeyong of Hyuna’s lipstick days.

Throat arching, he retouches away the wrinkles that are additional from when the life had dried off and gravity pinched everything down.

The professional that he is, Renjun swabs underneath each lip and ziplocks the result. Ramping up his elbow angle, he dips farther and scrapes a sample out that curls like a shaving.

“What’s that?” Taeyong asks, eyeing a helping of dirt clumped to a stainless steel tray.

“What do you think,” says Renjun. “Had to scoop it out like ice cream. That’s not even all of it.”

“We could be having ice cream right now,” Yukhei drones on absently, squinting from behind his skinny glasses. “But try to work with outside forces. Throws off your entire goddamn biorhythm.”

“Jet-lag,” reasons Renjun.

“And I’m here, but at what cost.”

“I am beside myself.”

“Who else was here?” Taeyong asks.

“Johnny,” Yukhei says. “And Lee dropped by, after.”

Renjun’s upper lip curdles. “Barged in like a dog with rabies. Flapped papers around because he’s connected with the case. Allegedly. And I lead a double life.”

“The other Lee,” Yukhei elaborates, mistaking Taeyong’s expression badly, “not ours. Not you, obviously. I keep… shit. Time-out.”

 _I keep_ :

not measuring my words like a fumbling idiot? Or

forgetting Mark’s not here anymore? Taeyong finds sore comedy in that because he never could, even in his lowest moments. Looking at Yukhei becomes hard now. Something smells of wet dejected dog in here, tail tucked so apologetic it’s all the way up Yukhei’s ass and he’s gagging on it.

Taeyong’s eyes hurt in the sterile light and in the gaping quiet. He forgets to adjust his useless jacket. He looks at Yukhei again and finds it in himself to simply not.

“What did he want?”

“Just to take a look,” Renjun repeats, pausing his mouthwork. His face has been brought sharper forward since Taeyong last looked at it, years ago, and now sharpens again. “You alright?”

“Cold,” Taeyong says.

But Yukhei fixates on: “Why… is the mouth like that?”

“It’s a dead body,” Renjun says.

And he’s not wrong. The jaw is cloistered ajar and very coy about its contents despite Renjun’s talents. Against the dark bruise of the face, Renjun’s knuckles push through the filmy latex of his gloves.

“Yeah, no shit.”

“He’s right,” Taeyong says. “Look—”

“There’s something inside.”

  
Johnny stares at Taeyong and repeats, “Love letter.”

“Obsession letter,” Taeyong corrects.

“He’s gotten a love letter,” Johnny says.

“Obsession,” Taeyong corrrects. “Plural, technically. All this time.”

“Identical with the rest?”

“As can be,” Yukhei says, considering, frowning all pretty.

“Except this time, it’s an actual letter.”

“By word of mouth,” Taeyong says.

“So to speak,” adds Renjun, his own mouth twitching.

Done with this shitshow, Johnny eyes them in a fashion that lets them know. And he looks so worn just then, for just a second, in the little pillows under his eyes he rubs over. “Stuffed how far down?”

“Well, esophagus, mostly,” Renjun says, concluding his tablet swiping. He angles it over for Johnny to see. Sweat bubbles press from inside his gloves.

“He wanted this one to stick out,” Johnny says.

“Message in a bottle is message in a bottle for a reason,” Taeyong says and all eyes compass to him. “Human bodies are his bottles.”

“Who’s he messaging?”

“You know who.”

“What about the teeth?” Johnny asks. “Left intact. He never did that before.”

“A flourish,” Yukhei mutters to himself.

“How does Jaehyun feel about this?” Johnny asks Taeyong. “The ‘letters’?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you think he feels?”

“Convenienced.”

“What does this one say?”

“I’m an admirer of your work. I fear it. I relate to it.”

“Jaehyun’s been unemployed for a while,” Renjun says, dry.

They all look at the retrieved piece of paper, ziplocked away on the steel table spotlight. It’s wet and wilted. Along its seeped margin, it has pre-printed plants.

It reads, “ _The_ something _of an empty gay is… brutal_ ,” Yukhei stops.

“ _The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose_ ,” Renjun supplies. “Elena Ferrante.”

“The lingerings of art,” Yukhei says. “In the pit of your stomach.”

“Please stop talking,” Renjun says.

  
He sees them and he’s hit with old longing.

“Talk about someone I didn’t think I’d be knocking into,” Hyuna says.

“You look,” Taeyong says because they do and he’s short on. So is their hair, clipped bobby and fraying like lean meat just shy of their jaw.

“How’s that work?” they ask, slinking along the cement wall. “They call you in seasonally, every time they’re out of their depth?”

“Johnny thinks I have a skill set.”

“Don’t get humble on me now,” Hyuna says. “He’s tryin’ to knock some cold sense back into you. Even if it’s the stupid way to go about all that.”

“You think it’s a mistake,” Taeyong neither states nor asks.

“I think you’re here,” says Hyuna, “so what’s it matter?”

Swirled sideways, Hyuna fingers into their back pocket, knuckling out a pack of cigs. The gentleman in them irons out the packet’s crumpled front door that makes it look like a deformed muppet. They poke its mouth out to Taeyong to help himself. It’s so close he smells the loose tobacco. It reminds him of loose teas left in the sun to rot, and there’s not a thing more delicious.

Hyuna takes one glance at whatever he’s telegraphing and says, “Mama raise a quitter?” and Taeyong tries not to dilute the eye contact. “You mind?”

“Knock yourself out.”

And when they forgo “commending” his willpower, asking to borrow it, Taeyong knows he doesn’t know them anymore.

They puff and all but crosshairs-clock him, cheeks rubbed from the cold. Spa steam whispers slow from their nostrils. The ends of their hair cling to their mouth and he’d like for them not to; it must be a problem when they eat.

From under his nose, Taeyong swipes the snot pulled into glitter drops.

Hyuna nods to him, unblinking. “You look awful hungry, Stick.”

  
Riper in the week, he drives back.

Well, Yuta drives him back. Yuta with his plasteline nose and his bucket hat. With his manic thyroid eyes and his strange decency that smells distinctly of belly button every time he leans too close.

Up the wet serpentines, the bushes get sparser and sadder, barely tufting to mop-grey existence once the dirt road has pristined into a representative thing of extensive shiny upkeep.

The road winds, now flanked by round stones into an impression of a slim lake of gravel. With the tip of his nose smushing the window, Taeyong watches the milky monotony. Everything morphs behind the fog around his mouth. He draws a mustache into his breath.

Only by the tick-untick pulse at Yuta’s jaw Taeyong makes out he’s chewing. He can smell the minty glop, its fresh slice on the air when Yuta opens his mouth. And chews too loud. And closes it again.

They’re beeped in through the gates. It’s a pleasant surprise this gutted trash can has managed to agonize them up the hill.

“Fellas,” Yuta nods through his rolled-down window.

Fellas are the delightful twosome: one skinny with his face melting off and the other with his belt thonged up his sweaty armpits.

“Fellas,” Taeyong murmurs.

“Common courtesy, Taeyong.”

“You don’t know each other.”

“Do now,” Yuta says, saluting with a mild smile. “Isn’t that right?”

“Name,” the sweaty one says.

Taeyong tells them his name again.

“Credentials.”

Taeyong says he has none.

“Reason for being here,” the skinny one corrects, side-eyeing his colleague.

“I have an appointment. Lee Taeyong.”

Lee Donghyuck’s office is a pompous asshole Taeyong doesn’t mind tracking with his filth. It’s old-new, sitting like water gleam on massive frames of lacquer plumping the chairs, the table, his nametag. The sunlight yellowing in blinds out his title; Taeyong points to its dull edge.

“You sure they know you work here yet?”

Bowtie loosed, Lee keeps on stirring his mystery juice in a cup of clear glass. It’s rubbed-down orange like his hair and it makes his head look like a tired grapefruit. He clicks the golden spoon against its lip, draining leftover drops.

“You look older,” Lee says.

Taeyong sits down.

“Whatever you’ve been doing,” Lee says again, “do less.” He nods to the scented candle at the edge of the table. “Opium. Doesn’t at all do what it promised. Do you like what I’ve done with the place?”

“The color is different.” The color of the walls, he means. They’re on the third floor. 

“Haunted house,” Lee aggrieves. “But I have to say, the atmosphere. It has a quality. It’s just been—different since he came here. What’s your umbilical connection telling you? Is he on stand-by?”

Taeyong says nothing.

“I think he missed you,” Lee answers himself, throning down behind the table. He pauses for a sampling sip, regarding Taeyong all over. “I think he did.”

“That makes one of us,” Taeyong says. Or maybe, he thinks, looking back at Lee.

“You’ve been to visit. Says a lot,” Lee says. “Doctor Bae has detected a staggering amount of homoerotic subtext in you and Jaehyun’s interactions. Have you tried looking into that?”

Taeyong observes being observed.

“She keeps extensive notes. Which, of course, is old news. The homosexuality and the eroticism, not so much the diaries.”

“What about you?” Taeyong asks, talking as wood.

Lee perks up.

“What have you detected?”

Lee deflates imperceptibly. “UST,” he says. “I find it quite fascinating.”

“You’ve been fascinated for a long chunk of your professional life.”

Itemizing in the drawers of his mind, Lee stares. He fingers at the visible part of his baby fat as if entertaining Taeyong’s input. And maybe, just maybe, he is.

Taeyong ticktocks to Lee’s knuckles, which have taken to ordering the tips of his ornate ballpens on the table until they’re all pointing at Taeyong.

So Taeyong asks, “How stable do you feel?”

“Stable enough to notice he’s courting you,” Lee says, unoffended. “And someone seems to be courting him. You see what came in his mail?”

“You check his mail?”

“Hey, hey, hey. That tone. I know what I’m entitled to.”

He should; keeping Jaehyun is expensive. Lee’s warrant into intimate trivia cost him a slab off his face when Jaehyun scalped it off, so lavishly he’s missing half a cheek now. Out the other end came a chunk of metal lodged under his cheekbone, keeping his face cosmetically intact. In the right light, it glistens.

That, as far as crowns go, is an explicit one. Taeyong watches it, but Lee won’t squirm.

“Are you here for something specific?” Lee asks. “Evaluation, finally?”

“Who’s got the keys to his… room?”

“Extra keen, I see.”

“He’s your dancing monkey, and he’s not dancing. You want things, he’ll want things, too, and I’m…”

“You just happen to be here,” Lee says. He pauses. “You know whose house this is.”

Through the freeze of his muscle, Taeyong cracks a smile. “Is she home?”

  
“He’s losing it,” he leads with.

“It’s Thursday,” Joohyun answers. Her skin is bouncy like gelatin. She looks like a picture, frameless and floating in the world of the ordinary.

It’s a shellshock to see her again, to just glide into a back-and-forth current as if it were, in fact, a Thursday archived from their previous timeline.

Upon sitting down again, again and again, Taeyong’s whole body crows.

“You think letting him set up camp here’s a good idea?” he asks.

“Which he?”

All right. Taeyong bites his walked-into-that smile.

“I’ve seen the tape,” Joohyun says just because. She stares. Locks on his knees. Taeyong stops their judder. “Repeatedly.”

He knows what she fears, and it might be the only one she wouldn’t twist out of admitting if he pushed. Even now she’s sitting on it. It’s hatching like an egg.

“Jaehyun read a lot after you left.”

“Whatever sense of kinship you thought there was,” Taeyong says, “is severed. No need to think anymore.”

“Like a limb? Amputations leave you uneven for a time.”

“Of the things that have the capacity to leave me in a state, this doesn’t even graze the list.”

She almost comments on that. “You’ve heard of phantoms, Taeyong. You’ve met them.”

He knows being called by his name is a shortcut to intimacy. He knows, but it still makes him feel like a person.

“You must still feel him. Do you dream about him?” she asks. “Does it hurt?”

He can feel the root of his nose. “Are you profiling me?”

Bae Joohyun, in all her regality, shrugs. “Time shifts minute things that snowball big. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

Gladly, too, Taeyong thinks. She must have been glad to be rid of the disease of him.

“Your minutiae are the same,” he says. “You just can’t help yourself.”

Two of Joohyun’s nails overlap. One burrows underneath the other, then they click apart in a pseudo-cleaning gesture. “Come have dinner with us,” she says at once. “Don’t be a stranger.”

“Us?”

“Us sounds good, doesn’t it. Better than I ever thought.”

“I would love to,” says Taeyong, but.

“Cats to bathe?”

“You could say.”

“Don’t break Sooyoung’s heart.”

“I want to see him again. Officially. If it’s not a bother.”

“It is a bother,” Joohyun says. “It bothers me very much that you’re so insistent on being a cretin, Taeyong. As is typical of your pack.”

“Teachers?”

Joohyun sighs.

“You begged me to come,” Taeyong says.

“A request,” she says, her mouth barely moving, “three years overdue. We had a situation. We handled it without you. Thank you.”

Taeyong pockets his resentment, but never as deep as to be out of reach. It’s better than thinking and what that thinking would lead him to. This manor makes him crawl inside.

So does she.

The stuffed deer head’s button eyes, hung above Joohyun’s head, are the only point of commiseration it affords him. It’s as dead as she is. And when she blinks, the atmosphere deflates like a wailing balloon.

“On one condition,” she says, tired of so many things at once. “You come to dinner.”

  
Walking back into places he left for a reason tastes like devolving.

Passing Renjun and Yukhei’s Decomposition Dungeon makes it worse, makes it rot inside him.

Another thing: Johnny’s office door is unusually open. Taeyong knows people sprout habits like these when you haven’t seen them, these out-of-character missteps in the parameters you’d delineated them within like dead bodies. Taeyong finds it uncomfortable when they come alive this way.

The carpet licks him inside, toweling at his shoes. Not the one he remembers, either.

After a beat of not knowing what goes where, of being here again, Johnny says, “It’s not good to be back, is it.”

“I’m not back,” Taeyong says, toeing into the carpet. “You’re borrowing.”

Neither of Johnny’s eyebrows move.

“Is this cotton?”

Johnny eyes Taeyong’s shoe. “Polyester.”

“Yours?”

“Yes?”

“No, I mean—your purchase?”

“Ah.”

“A gift then?”

Johnny’s amused. It’s also amusing how quickly that dies when Taeyong says, “I went for a few rounds with Kim.”

“Well, what’d they think?”

Johnny watches with his heavy curtain eyes. They’ve fallen in the lids with the years.

“They thought I’d gotten shit at my job.”

Taeyong waits then. He waits and waits and waits himself into a fungal state.

“Are you going to allow me in the field?” he asks.

“You got something to tell me?”

Jinx, Taeyong thinks, because that’s his line and Johnny’s sidestepping it.

  
He met Hyuna first fickle thing out of the academy. They handpicked him from the sea of not-fledglings-anymore, a not-fledgling-anymore themself, and sized him up, and developed a complex relationship with his hair.

“Who told you this was a good idea?” Hyuna said, combing into his forward bowl fringe. “Hysterical.”

He remembers painting their hoodie cheese-yellow and he remembers them twitching in it after a bleary morning jog. They didn’t have enough but he had, and he’d stopped because his ribs stung, and they kept on, and then they heaved, “Pussy,” knees palm-locked.

He remembers missing them terribly. Not at all and then all at once.

They’d always had this thing about crawling inside other people. That’s how they’d know exactly what he wanted and when, which package. That’s how they’re now the first one to spot him making a shit decision on a chase.

And a chase it is. The suspect is armed and more than suspect. They tail him each from a different side.

Hyuna has a clean shot.

Hyuna shoots, but Taeyong gets in the way.

  
“Thank God for Kevlar, eh?”

The effort it takes to try to sigh makes him regret trying.

“How bad?” he asks.

“No broken ribs,” Yukhei announces. Pinched against the lightboard, the scan winks a radioactive green on his shiny mollusk lips. “Like I said. God bless Kevlar.”

“Isn’t that a line about America?”

“If you experience any pinching, itching… any discomforty kind of feelings where you got poked,” Yukhei says. “Means what it says on the can. You got shot. Or you’re dying suddenly.”

Nodding, Taeyong side-eyes around. “Lunch rush hour?” Then he looks long at Yukhei. Looks so long the looking eats its tail.

“We’re not joined at the hip,” Yukhei shoos, all needled-balloon suddenness, but the Renjun-dimensional cutout in the here persists. After an aggressive round of lip-pursing, Yukhei gives up: “He’s got his own stuff.”

“To do or to deal with?”

“To deem whether it’s your business. And no offense or anything, like.”

None taken. None taken none taken none t “Did he say anything? About me.”

Yukhei’s sigh has throat in it. Yukhei’s monster hands fiddle. “Don’t listen to a solid half of what that guy says. Pretty sure that’s why we can stand each other.”

“Listen,” Taeyong says. “I changed my number. So if he called—”

“I don’t like saying this kinda stuff when two seconds ago you got”—Yukhei finger-snipes him—“y’know? Makes me feel like a bad doctor or something.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Do you accept the charges?”

Taeyong knuckles the bad visibility out of his eye, blinking on white-hot circles for a bit. He was drooling in his sleep.

He defaults to the clock on the wall he forgot he’d thrown out yesterday. He’s left staring at the patch of its ex-location the sun hadn’t faded.

“Yes.”

The line switches.

“How is Yok?”

Taeyong is surprised out of reaction. He swears he wedged the remote to his limbs into the couch crack.

Jaehyun’s voice patterns like a frozen lake, with little tumors of could unpack this, could unpack that, and there’s just so much.

There’s more on the sofa—

— there’s Jisung, and Taeyong’s blood curdles. He coaxes the toothpick of his arm into action, bolting his upper body out over the couch. His hand clamps over Jisung’s opening mouth, catching a wet front tooth.

“Alive,” Taeyong settles on, strained, shaking his head at Jisung.

And then Jisung licks Taeyong’s palm.

Taeyong very nearly icks out of his skin. Overriding the urge to, his nerves prick in place and he clamps tighter, grimacing, filing this for later to deal with.

Taeyong’s aluminum insides crunch. As if hearing the downsizing, Jisung perks up to the alarm. When Taeyong pokes his shushing finger upstairs, Jisung gives up on trying to find a bizarre game in this and goes on cotton feet.

Phone pressed to his collarbone, Taeyong swallows.

His sidestep from here to there weights the planks of his flooring like piano keys. It starts tender with the joint crackle of chalky black logs in a fire, then a bird bone’s snap, and the deepest one, like a taut bass string, that’s loosened from vigorous couching.

“Are you alone?” Jaehyun asks.

Taeyong’s shins sense the edge and squat him among the pudgy cushions, sinking like foam. He grabs for one and pancakes it on his belly. From the foot of the coffee table, Uyu’s lantern eyes aim at him two guns. Taeyong shoos him.

“Not any more than you are.”

A black curtain sweeps down his brain.

He imagines Jaehyun here with him now, glossy as a Polaroid. Finally he can reach. He fingers into Jaehyun’s supple hair, pads behind his cold ear. The dry of his throat knots up. He chests so close in, his skin puckers in goosebumps and he remembers this, he remembers everything.

He smells Jaehyun even though he can’t.

But if he can’t, really can’t, he wants to know where the sweet rot’s coming from.

Taeyong chases it like a leech a welling paper cut, with his breath all the curved way to Jaehyun’s bumpy throat. He does this until his nose warms from the skin on skin.

Hand on his sternum, Jaehyun asks, “Are you hurt?” It vibrates Taeyong’s nose.

“A little tender down the middle.”

Maybe Jaehyun watches as Taeyong reaches for his belt buckle. It zaps like an unzipping body bag when Taeyong unloops it from around Jaehyun’s hips, the tongue of it lazing down. Taeyong watches it from his tuck into Jaehyun’s neck. The buckle is surgically clean, touch-friendly. When he does get friendly with it, his nail slips on it. Then again.

Taeyong comes away from Jaehyun’s neck, fastening a gleaming badge of honor there.

It’s a relief how well the belt nooses Jaehyun’s throat. There are no eyelets this low on the root for something so lean. Pinching it below where Jaehyun’s swallows jump the most visibly pudges excess skin in the tuck, pinches it white then pink, little jerks of Jaehyun’s head like he’s disagreeing with Taeyong’s adjustments.

The airy lightbulb brings a sheen to Jaehyun’s eyes. For a moment, he looks full of words. But he coughs.

Taeyong collars tighter.

He coughs deeper, with a stutter, and that’s when Taeyong two-hands it.

Side to side.

Pull down.

Tug. Tug less gently.

He drags Jaehyun out into the cold blister and almost trips twice, but he drags him out to his favorite stump, heaving and burning and stung by the belt’s sash scuff over his forearm. His toes cramp into iced mud and it shoots shock up his heels and each breath guts him a little.

Hissing fog, Taeyong turns and pulleys Jaehyun close and dear like a dog. The trail of his body is a rocky one.

Propped by the stump, Jaehyun’s neck strains angry. Down its side curdles a milky blue vein, intercepted quarterway by the belt and forced back into the skin.

Jaehyun’s face is sunburned and his chest bulged out by the incline of this improvised bed, and isn’t this the most hilarious face he’s ever made. His airless blinks flit faster for how wet his eyes are, and he looks very uncomfortable, but still merely looks. At Taeyong, that is.

Breathing, Taeyong gulps around a wad of slime. He hopes he’s not catching a cold.

He backhands the liquidy snot off from his cupid’s bow and reaches for the ax.

He rotates his wrist. He raises the ax,

shaking like he’s been lopping wood senseless.

The black curtain is gone.

The tips of his toes twitch into Uyu’s feathery tail, squeeze it into the floorboard cracks. And he panics at just how easily misconstrued breathing patterns can be when you know where to listen in. With great care, Taeyong levers the speaker away from his mouth.

But he’s not the only one not talking.

“He doesn’t want to eat,” Taeyong says finally, rusty.

“Who?”

“The damn bird.”

“What are you feeding it?” Jaehyun sounds almost nostalgic.

Taeyong tries to remember other birthday presents.

“Taeyong.”

“Oats. I’ve been feeding him oats. And seeds.”

“Strapped for groceries?” Jaehyun quips. “Try rye and meal, throw in some cooked eggs if you’d like to spoil him.”

Pinching his nostrils shut, Taeyong takes pause from breathing to consider this situation. He uses the bottled exhale to say, “You’re a mental hospital patient.”

“There’s no shame in being that.”

“No,” Taeyong agrees. “It’s in your pretending to be one.”

“Much as I’d like to discuss—consider your offer reconsidered.”

Taeyong looks for words, for thoughts, rubbing his forehead. He cranes to check if Jisung isn’t cheating his way into this conversation, then looks out the window. White.

“Taeyong? I said—”

“I heard you. The offer,” he says, “to consult. It doesn’t come from me.”

“I know you’re strung-up. And I know who is tugging.”

“Then you know they’re watching us both.”

“Yes,” Jaehyun says. Lags. Say more, tell me anything, keep talking— “Put some ice on it.”

The line goes dark.

When the sky rings with silver haze, mushrooming like an explosion cloud, Jisung comments on the bag of frozen corn. He stands in front of the hearth like a stick in the mud, not letting himself be glossed over.

Taeyong blinks himself acute and eyes the cold, wet seep that crunched like snow when he first nursed it to his chest.

“Can I have that?”

“What?” Taeyong asks.

“Can I have it?”

“This?”

“Yeah, what else.”

“You want it?”

“I’m in the mood for corn.”

“Extravagant.” Taeyong sits up. “You can have it. With proper food.”

Jisung groans.

“And you have to best me in a swordfight for it.”

“How’s Hwi?”

“What?”

“How is Hwi?”

“Oh,” Hyuna says as if they misheard ‘kiwi’. Maybe they did. At Taeyong’s probing look, Hyuna rejoins the world with, “I wonder.”

“Hyojong?” Taeyong tries, already regretting socializing.

Trying out all these names isn’t fun anymore. They don’t fit his body. It just reminds him he once was one of them.

Hyuna looks at him like they’d eat him, that smug, elongating their neck, too smug for the type of weight these questions should instill. They steamroll cigarette smoke through the dam of their teeth, pinching the filter in the corner of their mouth. Coaxing Taeyong closer with a finger, their face opens up like unwilling fruit, selfish for its shell and then all at once.

They pull out their wallet. In it, a picture Taeyong’s happy to, too happy to, shuffle over for.

The single lamplight on the street swells orange fireball gas, so Hyuna has to angle until Taeyong’s nudging their chipped thumbnail off a girl’s face. It’s a girl. A face. She seems happy enough underneath the wallet mesh for her laugh to project faint bunny lines.

His mouth waters for a smoke. His tongue swells with spit, shuddering a tic all the impossible way between his fingers, still and always, like he’s a dog and someone rang the bell. Taeyong’s fingers twitch apart, ready for a filter.

“Turning thirty this spring,” Hyuna says, looking at the picture but watching him in skims. They want him to say something, Taeyong understands. “Talk about robbing the cradle.”

Dumbslapped, Taeyong looks up just in time to get a cloud of smoke blown in his face. Through it he can only make out the rueful tuck to Hyuna’s bratty mouth. His eyes water.

He still feels like he has the measles. Like he’s been contaminated.

He’s whisking pancake batter that ripples like stale bath water. These ripples ebb and tremble over each other, transiting filthy color. The more cinnamon Taeyong powders in, the more bathwatery it gets, and the flour he adds works his wrist, thickening.

Taeyong whisks and whisks the color uniform, paling it.

The pancakes puff up, browning on the overturn and landing like foam on the plate. A fibre of syrup slathers the face of the uppermost one, layering on itself and pooling down the rounded ribs off the sides. The blackberries Taeyong scatters scurry and bounce and stick in the honeytrap.

Eyes crawl over his back. In answer to the tap on the shoulder, Taeyong turns with the instinct, hefted plate in hand, and finds Jisung looking fast away from him.

There’s a shuffle. Taeyong looks closer. It’s Jisung doing the leafing this time. He picks a photo from case file three, forgotten on a chair, to stare at:

A man, starfished and toothless, eyes staring and mouth in a scream. His cheeks are eaten through. Arching out of his body is his ribcage, picked clean into white claws. Their roots still connect to his chestbone somewhere under the lush heaping of organs and maggots. The curdled blood makes it look like a vertically-cut blood sausage.

On autopilot, Taeyong nails the plate to the table, almost catching Jisung’s finger. He’s all thumbs in taking the photo back, plucking it from all corners before it unsticks. Tucking it back with the others, he failsafes it by smacking Jisung’s notebook with plants in the page margins on top.

“We’re out of eggs,” he says.

Johnny’s been looking at him weird.

“Look—”

“No, you look,” Taeyong says. When Johnny does, Taeyong wants a refund. He shrugs to emphasize his non-point of, “I’m neither short-skirted nor an intern. What?”

“What?”

“You think you’re so discreet?”

There’s a hangnail Taeyong’s itching to rip off. A barrage of them. He’s got no other band-aid as a stand-in and his palate vibrates with how much he wants a smoke and Johnny now seems genuinely displeased with how detectable his intracurricular hobbies have gotten.

“I push too far,” Johnny admits graciously into his third glass. He sounds so relaxed his syllables sway. “I was skeptical. When I recruited you.”

“You were.”

“I was. It could be too much, y’know, to hell with Joohyun’s good intentions. I could be making a fairly big mistake.”

“Fairly public,” Taeyong bothers.

“You looked positively molested the moment I approached.”

“I felt molested.”

Johnny takes a sip. His wet mouth glimmers. The liquid flickers of shadow pour down his nose and give him a jaw, and that jaw stays when he smiles self-deprecating. “Because of me.”

Taeyong snorts. That pockets him one of Johnny’s more honest looks.

“Everything at all times is too much, the way I’m wired.”

“And now…”

“You’re wondering. Well, now that you are, if you are,” Taeyong’ll just say, “I feel accused.”

Johnny rubs his nose with the rim of his glass then swirls his drink.

“Joohyun blames herself,” he insists suddenly. Taeyong examines his interest in her and the restraint not to show it, carefully packaged as though Johnny has been thinking about Joohyun often, and deems it not worth the pain of digging and understanding.

So he just says, “She should.”

“Poppy?”

Taeyong realizes she’s expecting an answer. “Pardon?”

“Poppy,” Sooyoung says, “do you like it?”

Taeyong shrugs.

“It reminds me of ants,” Sooyoung says, watching him. “And choking. Choking on burned ants.” Her big lips look bigger when she talks. They’re unnaturally unassuming, a chunk of shapeless pastel.

Taeyong pushes his own lips together. If not for the sauce hollandaise, they’d chafe worse.

The hovering spearmint smell gives him the sense of compulsive clean-up, or of being rubbed between someone’s teeth. Up and down, up and down between the white walls of tooth like mint floss.

This is how Taeyong finds out just who dines at five o’clock.

“Tell us, Taeyong, don’t be shy,” Sooyoung coaxes, scooping gooey black rice into her mountain of puréed sweet potato, mounding the pyre on top of the orange flame. A fat decapitated mushroom head rounds the edge of her plate on oil, jouncing before it stills. Licking the corner of her mouth, Sooyoung asks as if she’s supposed to know, “How’s your little one?”

Taeyong looks at the bite of tender salmon stabbed on his fork. He lingers where it’s greased white with albumin and underdone pink down the swollen middle. Then he looks at Sooyoung, suddenly a little sick, and puts the fork down.

“I know what a parent looks like,” Sooyoung says for his benefit, a nibble of politely sheepish. Her reaction feels learned. “You can relax.”

Joohyun takes a lick out of her glass of wine, watching him.

“So does Jaehyun,” Taeyong says, tongue numb. “He knows what a parent looks like.” Right then he slides his eyes off Sooyoung’s face, melting down her torso to where it’s cut off by the table edge. “You should take particular care when you walk by him. He can smell it, too.”

Sooyoung’s mealy cheeks strain against their twitch, the good or the bad kind, but they all look the same to him.

“You haven’t been,” Taeyong surmises. His mouth is just aftertaste and he needs a gum. The white tooth walls are swelling over him. “Your stomach is still flat. Are you afraid of your house guest? Of what he could do out of that cage?”

“Watch your tongue,” Joohyun says.

“Watch your wife,” Taeyong says.

“Desserts?” Sooyoung asks, standing up.

Her thick suede dress tapers down above her hips and sweeps out with her ankles like a vase. Her loose sleeves roil in layers of deep blush as she twists this way and that at the incoming traffic of waiters and does nothing to help. Joohyun watches this fondly.

Trays on legs march into the dining room. They smell richly of cavities, alternating cupcakes with poppy folded in the filling and tiramisù and red gelatin bowls—burned ants and coffee and blood clot burned ants and coffee and blood clot.

Taeyong’s brain is pulsing. “He gave me a goose,” he says just to say.

Joohyun’s jellylike forehead ripples. “As a pet?”

“To eat.”

“Have you?”

“You know I don’t like that kind of talk at the table,” chastises Sooyoung.

“It’s theme-appropriate,” Joohyun butters, thumbing over the heel of Sooyoung’s palm. To do that, she’s had to lodge her pale forearm between the skyline of brown porcelain sets and transparent platters, her knuckles jumping, and Taeyong doesn’t think he’s ever seen her smile before this.

She and Sooyoung are mirroring each other from the collarbones, talking in body language. They’re locked in an inside joke Taeyong feels awfully ostracized from.

He clears his throat. “He’s waiting. I just don’t know what for yet.”

Slowly, Joohyun looks at him.

On the crawl back, Yuta’s Ray Bans make it a toss-up. Either he’s drowning in existential anguish or he’s just not in the mood. His profile is swollen as it bounces on the miserable terrain.

“Has it been working out?” Yuta asks, wedging them onto the anthill highway.

He must be tired of being Taeyong’s chauffeur. And that’s when it does click that Taeyong’s body is here and now. In Yuta’s car, presently, and he has been since got in. He feels his own bubblehead nodding like it belongs right next to the cross-eyed Snoopy figurine on Yuta’s dashboard.

Taeyong takes his eyes off the big above, reroutes from the horror melting him from the belly. “Has what?”

“Yanno. This whole thing. You help people since you came back? ‘Cause you keep coming back.”

It does feel like that, but Taeyong doesn’t want it acknowledged. He wants it strangled and broken down.

“It’s likely we’ve prevented a number of murders.”

“That’s… good then,” Yuta says.

“Here,” Taeyong says. “For the…”

Glancing at Taeyong’s fist of money bills, Yuta sticks out his muscled forearm to knuckle at the compartment buckle. It takes two hits for its jaw to drop open and just one to shut Taeyong’s fist of money in. “It’s no problem.”

Against his will, because of this big yawny nothing Yuta’s silence spawns, Taeyong forces a, “How you been?”

“Oh, you know.” Yuta pulls at the blinker, looking both ways. “Been good, pal.”

“That’s good then.”

“Same old. Think moving’s on the horizon, though. I don’t reckon Ten wants me around anymore.”

Taeyong closes his eyes.

“You think you know someone, and then they do something, and you realize your own arrogance right then,” Yuta says.

“Or not arrogance,” Yuta says, trails off.

“You should come by, I’ll throw a barbecue party or something. Last one, prolly,” Yuta says, wavering on a smile.

And then Yuta says, “Poor thing.”

Taeyong opens his eyes.

On the wet road ahead, a black seed.

They jingle closer in the car on the iced road, and it’s a fluffy slipper Jisung forgot out in the snow.

It’s a black loaf as Yuta stomps on the brakes short of tire-recycling it into a flat letter format. The windshield, fashioned like an overbite to bring Taeyong closer, acts as a magnifying glass. The wretched seat farts when Taeyong leans forward.

Unclicking his seat belt, Yuta levers the brake and hops out of the car. His mustard cargo shorts bring out his goosebumped hairy calves, his Crocs squeaking like bed springs.

It’s a cat, that thing on the wet road, dead flat on its side. Its stiff paws point straight like soft popsicle sticks of suggested direction, but where they point there’s nothing but grass mohawking somewhere under its snowed-in load.

Still glossy, the blood splash under the cat’s head had seeped into a perfect starfish of paint. It’s limp and so absurd it’d fit right among Jisung’s old stuffed toys sunsetted around his bedframe.

And the head. The cat’s eye is popped huge out of its socket like a green billiard ball, funnily round. It’s pruned matte of any wetness, sitting stuck by some miracle just at the edge of the eyehole.

Taeyong’s sadness sediments like a real thing, but one far away, in someone else’s gut.

The road has a lisp; it’s all the moist air and atoms rubbing. This lisp filters in through Yuta’s opened car door.

When Yuta, sleeves pawed over his hands, moves the dead cat, the eye lolls and hangs by its taut nerve.

“Where are the scans?”

“What?”

“What? The scans. Chenle wants them yesterday.”

“Don’t say it like that, man,” Yukhei says lightly, greening a little.

They’re back to nitpicking John Doe’s body, overturning the stones, letting new bodies pile up on Jaemin and Chenle’s table instead.

“You make your own bed, man,” Renjun remarks, “and your funeral at which I’ll toast.”

The whole of Yukhei’s face disappears in his hands.

“You’re swearing in your head, aren’t you?” Renjun asks.

“None of your damn business what I do in my head, pardon my French.”

“0.023% Caucasianness coming through,” Renjun comments.

Rolled in two layers of blanket in the tiled corner, Taeyong wobbles on the tightrope between nightmare and vacuum. Yukhei and Renjun look half-unreal when they lock in a staring contest of sudden comprehension.

“What is this tomfoolery,” Yukhei grumbles. His mollusk lips are twisted. “For real?”

Blinking, Taeyong sharpens.

“This isn’t another one in the series,” Renjun tells Taeyong. “The final one of the Tooth Fairy’s. This… is the Tooth Fairy.”

The sunset is Hello Kitty pink and rays like an angry bulb down at him at the last corner, mirroring viciously off the snow. Blinded, Taeyong improvises an umbrella with his hand.

He looks for Jisung’s extracurricular cluster, but he’s alone by the climbing frames.

“I told you not to do this.”

“Don’t be embarrassed?”

“I can get home on my own. I can take the bus.”

Taeyong cups that H-word, tries not to break it.

He thinks about his sister as often as Jisung misses her. But they don’t make a show of it and they don’t make a tell of it by far, just try to phase out the hurt and jealousy.

Sometimes Taeyong feels he violated her motherhood from her, took Jisung and said mine, and he might spend more time breaking that down had she not kickstarted the avalanche to what she had coming.

Jisung is young. What hurts him now the years will sand off from his forefront memory and sink deep into an ugly, thankless place in his belly or in his chest. It differs from person to person.

Sometimes he’s glad she got worse. It gave him Jisung, and it gave Jisung a placeholder parent when Taeyong lost his placeholder kid. He hates thinking about it like this. He hates thinking.

“Getting mixed signals here,” Taeyong says. “Does that mean you don’t want the popsicle?”

Fractionally interested, Jisung’s bump of a nose twitches. “What popsicle?”

Taeyong sees himself in the gloss of that eye-roll. Kids are mirrors. Sometimes that worries him.

“They’re allowed now? Now?”

Taeyong short-circuits. They’re allowed now because… “There’s an exception to every rule.”

“Sounds like a-betting.”

“Okay, nine-year-old.”

Jisung considers this. “What flavor?”

The cement wall presses an ice pack to his shoulder blades. He’s holding a cigarette. His lungs are tender and unfurled for it, but the pleasure is just background noise suppling his nerve fibers from flaying apart and him alive with it.

“Mark died in a fire,” Taeyong says. “Or what was left of him. I don’t know. Nobody knows. There were no dentals, but there were signs of dismemberment. Meticulous.”

“Everything but the head,” Renjun had said, not sounding like himself at all.

“The rest?” Hyuna prompts, soft like talking to a wound. This is wound talk they’re doing. It’s so familiar Taeyong doesn’t know what to recoil from first.

“Uh, the face,” he says. “I assume he ate it. He might’ve taken more meat that didn’t melt off. Mark had good muscle, even in the face.”

Hyuna is silent. Taeyong won’t look higher than their mouth. Their mouth is soothing because he remembers it moving on multiple occasions, old and new. Taeyong feels like he can tell it things.

“She didn’t have a fire alarm,” Taeyong tells their mouth, rubbing creases into his face, stopping at his neck. He pinches the elastic skin on his throat.

Hyuna is silent.

“I dream,” he begins.

But, “Sometimes,” he continues.

He takes a shaky drag that he feels with his hard palate. He marinates his tongue in the sting of it for a forever while and merely slits his mouth open to let it out.

“Sometimes I want him so much it disgusts me.”

When he dares look, Hyuna looks disgusted, too.

“I would like to smell you.”

It’s noon. Jaehyun’s behind his insect glass, face starched, coffee cup midair. His clean figurine hair supples towards his forehead because he isn't looking away from his read.

“How many times have you done that,” Taeyong counters, impatient the way he’d never be with a child.

Because the difference is, a child would listen. When he was still drowning in his elephant clothes, short-limbed and all trunk, Jisung would listen. Granted—and it always was—he’d throw a wild fit first just in case, fisting his shirt to pulp and blushing to the soft skin of his ears from the headache of his opinion.

Don’t you touch that. Don’t, you stinky brat. And it would work, eventually.

“You’re all new again,” Jaehyun says.

Mark’s fingers were always stickier.

“What do I get?” Taeyong asks.

“You can smell me, too.”

I don’t want to smell you, he wants to say. I’m sick, but you’re worse. It’s eating me.

Taeyong resumes his light reading of the most recent murder, unrelated to anything, uninteresting. The photos now pour vaguely.

He tacks on, “I don’t work like that.”

Jaehyun’s mouth twitches in the lower regions. Taeyong catches this because he’s looking, and now that he is and he’s seen something, anything, he’s stuck in the shiny glaze.

“Have you been relying on sugar to stave off other cravings?”

“And I’m supposed to think you’re diagnosing the quality of the produce I consume because… you don’t want to eat me?”

“Don’t equate yourself to my food,” Jaehyun laments. “You aren’t.”

Taeyong eyes to the side. The rest of the room blurs around the tight pinch of his focus. On the cameras and what they might catch that he wouldn’t like discovering was ever there without his consent.

The cameras might be thinking what he is; to truly get the nuances of what Taeyong eats, Jaehyun would have to taste the inside of his mouth. Lick in there, stay in there. Root in there. Taeyong would have to open up so wide.

Taeyong comes nearer.

A black curtain sweeps down his brain. The insect glass and its cut-in holes, level with Taeyong’s carotid, they all melt down. Jaehyun’s black hair saturates.

The shadow of his reaching hand projects over Taeyong’s closed eyelids. Taeyong’s baby hairs sizzle to standing. Jaehyun fingers over them and combs to the roots higher at his scalp, nails collecting the week-old bedhead butter. Jaehyun stops at the pen tucked behind Taeyong’s ear. Pinching the lobe, pulling it down, he plucks the pen away.

“Your hair used to be so long,” Jaehyun hums, voice brittle in the corners. Taeyong wants to follow the spider cracks and break them in. Chewed wire ends frizz in the back of his neck.

He can pinch Jaehyun in place like this, make him not oily and slippable, and like this, Jaehyun’s not wearing several misleading personas at once. The one he prefers is enough. Sorting them apart used to be hard.

Jaehyun says, “Donghyuck refers to it as ménage au froid.”

“It?”

“Us.”

“Are we an ‘us’?”

“You are you. I am me. You are also me, inverted.”

“A negative.”

“Yes. The colors might seem quaint.”

“They’re ugly,” Taeyong says.

“Come anyway.”

Taeyong comes anyway, angling to the holes. Aligning, the hinge of Jaehyun’s jaw studs as he elongates his throat. A crisp strip of his white collar dips away from his neck, pointing like an arrowhead to the scoop between his collarbones.

There, Taeyong smells Mark’s fabric softener.

Taeyong smells it again. And again, to make sure.

Mark is alive.

Mark is alive he might be

“Give Jisung my greetings,” Jaehyun says.

That reaches into him like a hand.

Now the black curtain is gone and the yearning is gone and Taeyong can’t speak, palm pressed on the glass panel still, fat around the knuckles. On the other side, Jaehyun’s hand starfishes in the same splay, pressing like they could touch through on pure alignment. Fog has started whitening from under Taeyong’s clammy fingers.

Taeyong forces a breath. Taeyong exits blindly. He does it out of his body, blinkered like a horse. His chest tightens up into a tiny box. Inside, his heartbeat is locked.

The world shrinks somehow, oddly, unsettlingly like a joint out of socket, and Taeyong is booming through it like a gun like a stamping hoof like a hamm

er

His knee buckles. He irons it out, back to straight, up, and on the last step slides down against the door of Yuta’s car like insect.

Splat. He splats a little. His sweaty hand makes a misleading squeaky-clean sound as it smears the window.

His breath stings his ribs. The gravel crumbs under him feel mountainous, inaccessible, even as they peel skin from the bone of his ankle. Taeyong claws deeper down for texture. All that dregs up is residue snow, drooling down his hands.

Hands. Under his armpits, flat like shovels. They hoist him up and nearly keel over the both of them.

Yuta puppets him into the car. Taeyong’s limbs are a doll’s, detached far away from belonging to him, loading up the passenger’s seat with loose, steaming meat. Where his shirt rides up, the leatherette’s cucumber cold gropes the small of his back.

Oh. He forgot his jacket.

Already he imagines his soupy sweat sticking him to the backrest semi-permanently. He imagines it as a broad slug coating the small of his back, growing fatter, juicier, a melting glue stick. Sprawling into the sopping feeling, he can’t muster his usual disgust.

“How do I help?” Yuta asks.

You help by shutting the fuck up. You help by never speaking of this again. Taeyong looks away from Yuta’s skeleton face, and that’s signal enough.

Yuta’s legs work like a squeezebox when the bellows of his folded knees take in air as they straighten, cracking subtly like chalk.

Smart by way of repetition, Yuta doesn’t ask any more. He just micromanages from the corner of his eye now and again, blinking as if through a cataract, the chap that he is with the hand on the wheel, and if Taeyong trusted his legs, he’d take a stroll out of the moving vehicle.

The car is gassed up with a Little Tree’s toxic orange and Axe body spray. In the car’s cozy womb of heating, it blankets the back of Taeyong’s throat. He swallows down his chunky nausea.

The snow has watered down into an ugly smoothie bowl thing. With an armful of guest, Taeyong mucks to his favorite stump, now set like a dirty picnic.

He kneels down onto the rubber mat. He feels his own cartilage when he sniffs against the cold.

Yok the goose goes against his will, slapping out his pulsing whirlwind wings from inside Taeyong’s armpit, and he’s quacking and quacking, vibrating distress in Taeyong’s hands. Taeyong’s hands are solid from the winter numbness.

“From the side,” Taeyong tells Jisung, who sloshes in to help and nearly cleaves his chin in his boulder Wellingtons. “Hold the torso tight. Bit lower.”

Jisung half-hugs the torso, denting the feathers. On the stump, Yok’s beak snaps. Its lidless eye jewels. Taeyong forces its head down, necklacing behind its skull. He curls his nails inward like he does when he’s chopping greens. He winds his heavy hand back, no flourish, and axes Yok’s head clean off.

Ish. The spine always crunches like a chomp of cucumber and teases lingering before it disconnects.

Blood swells. It seeps into the wood, smeared off the ax in a swift picture—and Taeyong should’ve worn those gloves. Careful of the feathers, he elbows Jisung aside, hefting Yok’s motorboating feet cloudward until the dying catches up to them, shaking out his wet hand.

Like that, he has Jisung help tie Yok to a sinewy branch to drain the blood. As Yok sways and twirls, the blood slobbers and steams, punching lazy red holes through the slush, diluting it orange.

His upper lip is starting to crawl, maybe from the feathers. He never considered an allergy.

Taeyong’s grandpa used to have geese.

He would tell Taeyong stories, and when Taeyong’s body inflated him like a balloon animal trick into puberty, popping his knuckles, pulling his legs, his grandpa would show him.

He’d let Taeyong pick a goose. He’d let Taeyong befriend it, then behead it, poorly, and then he’d pry the ax from him and finish the swing with the strength Taeyong hadn’t yet brawned into.

His grandpa would mutter a temple chant of instructions.

First this, he’d say, puffing. You save the feathers like this. Don’t let no blood near.

Lay it down like this. Wings wide. When you have it here—you smooth it. Gimme the cloth, he’d say, and Taeyong would give him the cloth, and its slimy skin wetness would valley over his grandpa’s fingers.

Grandpa would caress the cloth over the headless goose, dough to a pie, and then he’d take the hot iron to it.

Loosens up the feathers, grandpa would say, and he was right. The feathers teased off easier soggy in Taeyong’s hands, but the roots with yet-unpuckered feathers remained a bitch to remove. When the goose was naked to the eye, the adult feathers pouched, grandpa would flamethrow the baby feathers off. Taeyong loved watching him do that.

“Taeyong?”

Taeyong takes a breath. “Hey, now, don’t cut yourself. What did I say.”

“Listen to what I say,” Jisung mumbles under his petty breath.

Yok unspools under Taeyong’s knife. By the time he’s done with clean-up, tying a sharp knot at the end of Yok’s intestine, Jisung sniffs, “The thing you were doing, with the peas? D’you wake up and think you’re burning?”

Taeyong pauses.

“I’m not stupid,” Jisung says.

“God forbid,” Taeyong barely manages from under paralyzing fondness.

“Is that why we’re moving? You can’t handle being here anymore?” Jisung’s eyebrows fall. “Sorry. I just.”

“Where’d you get that? That we’re moving?”

Jisung shrugs. “Aren’t we?”

“No,” Taeyong says. Just you are. “Now help me out, will you.”

He finds Renjun in his office because Renjun has an office now.

“Don’t,” is the first thing Taeyong says.

“I’m reporting you.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“You’ve forged evidence, at best. Jesus, I hope at best is the case.”

“Hear me out.”

“You’ve been waterboarding me with filler bullshit.” And Renjun looks like that one actually bothers him.

“Renjun. You’re all stupid.”

Renjun stares like he’s smelling something bad.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to show you.”

“Show me? Show me?”

“I can see through things you can’t. I’m the only one in this place who’s got their head screwed on right.”

Renjun laughs. “Oh, boy.”

Taeyong rides that cruel edge just a little; for himself and the ancient sport of it. His competence deserves to be questioned, out of spite and for Renjun’s caustic hurt. Taeyong takes a real look at him.

“I hate that,” Renjun says, tonguing into the skin over his lower teeth. “That. That thing you do with your mouth like when you’re trying to impersonate an emoji.”

“Three days is all I ask.”

“Will you kill him?” Renjun asks.

For his comfort, Taeyong nods.

“Will you tell me?” Renjun blurts, and it sounds conditional. “Everything?”

Whatever he’s gleaning from Taeyong’s face, Renjun thinks on it, picking it like little berries until there’s a stack of them. Renjun blinks on it. He sighs a flutey, so-like-him, “Didn’t think so.”

“I know we don’t talk anymore.”

Renjun’s jaw muscle flickers.

Taeyong’s cell starts ringing.

Renjun’s eyes drop to his vibrating pocket, then jump up to his face. Taeyong knows taking the call is his cue to get lost. Mustering some sort of apologetic, he ducks out of Renjun’s office without asking for forgiveness. Nobody chases after him.

Across the door is another door, identically moodless, from which stares Yukhei’s nametag.

Taeyong answers the call.

“You rang?” asks Lee’s faraway voice, floated from the speaker.

“Are your calls being monitored?” Taeyong guesses.

“Sounds worse than it is, I think. Some people like that.”

“I changed my mind. I’d love one last evaluation. If you’re interested.”

Lee sighs. “God.” His shuffle sounds expensive. New bootwear, Taeyong would wager. Sounds steel-tipped. “God, are you there? Is this is a trap?”

“Are you interested?”

Lee takes a slurp as if of something steaming, sucking careful air before he tips the teacup enough to sip. “You’re in terrible luck. An afternoon slot’s just freed up.”

“He’s dead,” Johnny says through the phone.

He is, Taeyong thinks now, in Joohyun’s office, Johnny’s tincanned voice solidifying into his beartrap body. He’s radiating beside Taeyong. Taeyong can feel Johnny’s minute shifts like rippling tectonic fabric workings against his wristbone. A bit closer to the epicenter and he’d feel his pulse, too. A bit steeper of an angle and he could press into it.

His groggy 4-a.m. blood makes him sticky inside. It’s debilitating how he hadn’t accounted for this anywhere along his gameplan. The ache’s needlepoint threads from his patellae to his eyes, stringing his insides along like clothes left out to dry. It’s not a game, he settles. It’s not. He wants to snort into a laugh so badly to relieve the anxiety, but he can’t. 

The 11’s in Johnny’s forehead trench his dough skin deeper. Nowadays, he looks sleepier when he frowns.

Eyes dragging, Taeyong watches the tape rewind again.

“A fucking pen,” Joohyun says. “Where did he even get a pen? Is this a stationery store?”

Taeyong watches the rewinding tape. In its backward onscreen Orihon flit, Jaehyun unsticks the fucking pen from Lee’s carotid comically fast and the rocket spray slurps back into Lee’s neck as if it never was.

Johnny presses play.

On screen, the glass wall enamels between them. Tape-Jaehyun and tape-Lee are now having a tidy conversation on either side. Where Lee is pacing, twitchy-legged, Jaehyun waits. Their touch-and-go talk transfers as an air cheek kiss here and an air cheek kiss there, hedged off the side of Lee’s mouth where he resists just so.

But Jaehyun jimmies at that resistance and like a ventriloquist rotates Lee’s body to face him, opens his talking head more talkative, leans him in from the neck.

Lee comes closer to the glass.

“You’ve been set up,” Jaehyun says.

Lee is excited. “By whom?”

“You.”

Through the hole cut in for breathing, Jaehyun stabs him in the neck.

“Taeyong,” Johnny says. “A moment.”

In her contained anger, Joohyun is short on sparing anyone a glance, but she does so very pointedly.

In the suffocating corridor, Johnny’s cologned pulse point bends down to Taeyong’s level.

“Is this a thing? The thing you’ve got?” Taeyong doesn’t bother to follow, and Johnny can’t resist being more helpful. “You have a problem.”

“Now it’s a problem?”

“This is not the dizzy honeymoon stage of getting to know someone. It’s not a one-way street. You’re too familiar, and that’s being very, very kind.” Johnny pauses. Johnny glances at him.

“Lee isn’t my fault,” Taeyong says, only thinking about what he knows Joohyun fears. It’s not Jaehyun. It’s Taeyong. Lee isn’t his fault. But of course it’s Taeyong.

“People have expressed concern,” Johnny says, and that tips a finger under Taeyong’s chin. Renjun ratted you out, Johnny meant to say, rather.

“Of?”

“Can you tell what’s real?”

“I feel like you’re trying to say something.”

“You’re off the case.”

Thinking you’re something and being something are one and the same. Is that it? Johnny’s fortune cookie for the day?

Are you in love, Johnny would say, say to Taeyong, some six years ago, over night brainstorming. Same way he’d say, This morning, I took this huuuge shit, had Sriracha. And then he’d just continue chewing because he was eating Kebab for late dinner.

But Taeyong’s cogs would teethe into overdrive, and they did, and they are, and they’ve never stopped since.

Mark has to be alive. He can’t tell Johnny that.

Jaehyun will come to Taeyong. Jaehyun will tell Taeyong where Mark is, and this goddamn circle of madness will end.

“But I’m not,” Taeyong says, head angling sideways. “You do that, Lee’s extensive report is coming to light.”

Only just now Johnny starts listening.

“I was damaged goods under duress. You encouraged that duress. I expressed my concern to Doctor Lee about the deterioration of my mental state under your supervision.”

Full-stop by full-stop, Johnny’s official persona glaze dries down into something nasty and bare.

“I tried to broach the topic with you, to no avail. Six years ago, I quit. To no avail. Doctor Lee’s pre-mortem note, bless his soul, corroborates this concern. Across days and years.”

Taeyong’s temples are beating like wings. For the first time, he thinks Johnny might wind back. Start hitting him. Not stop. Blood pulls to his face. Johnny looks hurt. Johnny looks like he would like to hurt him.

Taeyong doesn’t fear it, just anticipates it; just like he’s anticipatory of the gun strapped to his waist and the speed at which he’d have to blow Johnny’s brains out should the angle warrant it. Taeyong wants to apologize.

“You’ve forfeited your right to witness protection,” Johnny says.

The moon still ticks him off. It’s the most taxing monthly when it’s fat with glitter and ready to pop. Taeyong knows it’s because it was hung up there and oversaw each of his worst days like an obese karmic cherub, like when he was crawling across his floor and when he was out of his body and wanting to die.

His last apartment was a snowglobe into which everything trickled. The light, the migraine moans of the city, the imaginary peep-holing eyes. He had such bad moments on that parquet floor.

Then he bought a new place to escape the bad moments, and then he had brand-new bad moments in the brand-new shack.

Then, for himself and Jisung, he siphoned the cottage from his savings. When plunged in the dark right, the cottage is a tomb.

“You killed a man for my attention,” Jaehyun greets from the doorway.

He can talk freely now. He sounds on the verge of a dream in the coming down with a cough way. Leaning like that twists his body line hip-out. Taeyong’s eyes prick. His hands start buzzing. His arms feel full, like something is spilling out of them and slithering. Insides. Guilt.

Jaehyun looks alive. The police uniform is tight as a stocking on him, blood-black in splashes of leftover policemen down his belly. The moonlit shadow tickling his neck could be just that, or something warmer, pushing out with his vein as he calms his panting.

Taken, he looks around but touches nothing.

It’s handprints. They flare purple and pop and tick as he passes under the bulb. On his lazy stomp inside, he tracks runny mud. Laced halfway up, his boots beat like a heart, wet around the edges. Heart heart heart. Heart. Two more hearts bring him across the living room, pouring a silhouette on the couch.

He slinks something out of his breast pocket. Sets it down on the coffee table.

The pen has blood crust on it. Jisung had written homework with it before. Taeyong had bookmarked with it before.

The ugly of having his space’s intimacy picked apart propels him forward. “He was already dead,” he says.

No glass panel. Cheeks appling, Jaehyun looks at him like he’s seeing him for the first time. Something slots into place. That ill thing. Nothing is missing, there’s no sense of being displaced.

He touches Taeyong’s cheek. It tacks because blood dries down that way.

“A dying man killing people,” he murmurs low, rearranging Taeyong’s excuses. He’s not quite mocking and not quite on a stage.

Taeyong’s had narcissistic teachers before. He’s been one.

“Cancer smells like spoiled peaches,” Jaehyun says. “Near-sloshes. He’d been marinating in fruit for a painful while, so he chose to inflict that pain on others.”

Taeyong knows all that.

“Did that speak to you?”

From over his jutted lower lip, Jaehyun’s teeth are glassy red. Sat fatter, the lip’s skin is broken through the inseam. Taeyong can smell it as he steps in so tight their hips touch. The floorboards croak. When he talks back, their mouths narrowly miss each other.

“Johnny said I had a problem. His last words to me.”

“You do,” Jaehyun agrees, touching Taeyong’s gun through his hand.

“Yes, he’s right.”

Jaehyun’s chin is polished with sweat. Touching the beginning swoop of Taeyong’s hair makes him track his own motion. A cat. “Time to go.”

“Tell me where Mark is.”

Jaehyun lingers. Taeyong waits.

Taeyong keeps waiting. He is so sore from it.

“Where Mark is,” says Jaehyun. “Mark is in the woods.”

“Here? With you?”

Taking warmth as he steps back, Jaehyun pauses for nothing. He looks at Taeyong, through and inside Taeyong, and Taeyong knows he missed this.

“His head was heavy. Fit right,” _here_ , he mimicks under his arm, watching Taeyong. “First I scooped his eyes out. Then I cut off his nose. He twitched, but he usually did.”

Taeyong takes a breath, blinking. His lungs expand like paper bags and he’s choking on irrational thirst and the faucet in the kitchen

drips it’s drippi ng

He knows. He knows he should’ve called the plumber.

Guns are heavy, they make you lopsided. This one makes his hand weigh a small child. He doesn’t know what to do with his light hand, rubbing his face, fidgeting at his neck to give it an idea.

For the millionth time, he looks down at his gun hand. The back of it does look like a veiny crab. Scuttling. It looks like it hides knives and it looks too old for him, chafed dried fruit in the basket of his bones. Taeyong lifts the gun.

Jaehyun’s eyes blow bigger. Seeing him care about something is terribly satisfying.

Taeyong brings the gun to his mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> [ hmm ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHLByr515Ng)


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